3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

Reviewers in the nineteenth century noted that narrative fiction on either side of the Atlantic seemed to be moving in different directions—the social-realist panoramas of Charles Dickens and George Eliot were confronted by the metaphysical puzzle-boxes, allegorical curios, and sentimental interfaces of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Lydia Maria Child, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In the period, this divergence was often characterized by reference to a generic or modal distinction between the novel—the very name of which advertised its modernity—and the romance, which was associated with medieval literary traditions. British novelists sensibly confined themselves to representing and anatomizing that which was probable in contemporary social reality, whereas American romancers insisted on violating verisimilitude via flights of fancy (e.g., deathless black cats and white whales), whether out of political activism, aestheticist indulgence, or esoteric exploration. The twofold objective of this course is, first and foremost, simply to engross ourselves with a series of compellingly weird narrative fictions by American writers that self-identify as—and self-consciously theorize—modern romance—a reward in itself; and, second, to trace the history of the romance/novel distinction from early nineteenth-century reviews to contemporary criticism, discovering in the process the cultural work this distinction—and its elision—has been made to do. Primary texts may include: Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok; Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie; Edgar Allan Poe, tales, Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; Nathaniel Hawthorne, tales, The House of Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance; Herman Melville, Mardi; Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Minister’s Wooing.